More new patients, without your schedule grinding to a halt

Why does advertising for dentists work differently than for other businesses?

Because in dental care you don’t steer on as many enquiries as possible, but on the right enquiries at the moment there’s room in the schedule. Dental care is one of the few sectors where demand structurally outstrips supply. That inverts the brief: a dental practice doesn’t need a lead machine, it needs an intake dial that opens and closes per treatment and per location.

For a webshop or a professional services firm, more leads is simply better. For a practice, a surplus of general registrations leads to waiting lists, an overloaded front desk and patients who drop out anyway. Everything below follows from that one difference.

Does Google Ads work for a dental practice?

Yes, and usually better than Meta — people actively search for a dentist, so the demand already exists and is merely being captured by someone else. The condition is that you pull your treatments apart.

A check-up, an implant and an orthodontics track differ in value by a factor of ten or more, yet cost roughly the same per click in Google Ads. As long as they sit in the same campaign with the same conversion goal, the algorithm sees no difference and optimises towards volume — that is, towards the cheapest enquiry, the one that’s commercially worth the least.

The solution isn’t complicated, but it’s rarely done well: separate campaigns per treatment category, each with its own conversion value and its own budget. Once that’s in place, you steer on what you actually want to fill instead of on a total count.

How do you separate emergencies from elective treatments?

With separate campaigns, separate ad copy and separate time windows — because they are two completely different conversations.

Someone searching for “emergency dentist today” wants to know one thing: can I come in now, and where. Someone searching for “crown cost pros and cons” is weeks to months into a decision. For emergencies, reachability is what counts: a phone number prominently in view, opening hours in the ad, and preferably only visible at the times someone actually picks up. Advertising on emergency terms on a Sunday evening while the practice opens Monday at eight is giving money away. For elective treatments, the exact opposite matters: explanation, a price indication, and a reason to get in touch now instead of in three months.

How do you measure enquiries that come in by phone?

With a forwarding number that records the call and, past a threshold — usually 60 seconds — sends it back to Google Ads as a conversion. In dental care that isn’t a detail; it’s the heart of the matter.

In most sectors, the gains lie in better ads. In dental care, they lie in better measurement. So many enquiries come in by phone that a campaign measuring only forms structurally draws the wrong conclusion. I regularly see practices that switched off their best-performing campaign because “no conversions” came out of it — while that was precisely where most of the phone calls came from. Setting up call measurement takes days, not weeks, and typically changes the entire picture of which campaign pays off.

How do you advertise for multiple locations or one specific area?

One campaign per location, each with its own radius, its own budget and its own landing page — not a single campaign with every town name stuffed into it.

Patients pick a dentist almost entirely on travel distance. That makes the catchment area the most important targeting setting you have, and immediately the most neglected one: a 25 km radius around a practice in a dense city buys visitors who will never come, while 25 km in a rural area can be too tight. Run several locations and the trap is that they suppress each other’s ads and you pay twice for the same search.

The setup that works: one campaign per location, a radius matched to how far people there will genuinely travel, town names in the ad copy and on the landing page, and opening hours and a phone number per location. Someone searching “dentist ” should see the practice in that town — not head office.

What does advertising for a dental practice cost?

For one location in a mid-sized city, count on € 750 to € 1,500 of media budget per month, plus management. You pay that budget directly to Google, not to me.

Less is possible, but then it takes longer before there’s enough data to steer on — and until that point the algorithm is making decisions on too little signal. Click prices in dental care typically run between € 1.50 and € 5, with peaks on implantology and orthodontics, where the value per patient justifies it. What you ultimately pay per new patient depends mostly on two things within your own control: how fast the front desk picks up, and whether the landing page is about the treatment someone clicked on.

What you can expect from me

I work a fixed number of days per week, fully dedicated to your accounts. You won’t get a junior who handles it alongside ten other clients. Everything runs in your own Google and Meta account, so you keep the campaigns, the history and the data — even if we ever part ways.